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CSET Policy Brief OCTOBER 2020 Designing Alternatives to China’s Repressive Surveillance State CSET Policy Brief AUTHOR Dahlia Peterson Executive Summary Since the 1950s, China has built a formidable surveillance state increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided China an opportunity to soften the reputation of its surveillance technologies, which include tracking apps, surveillance by drones, cameras inside and outside houses, remote temperature scanning, and upgraded facial recognition to identify mask wearers. These technologies have now been legitimized for public health purposes. COVID-19 may accelerate China's domestic surveillance efforts and lead to investments creating capabilities preserved post-COVID. Globally, China's surveillance model may gain even more legitimacy as a vital tool beyond the pandemic, further deepening normative advantages for China by allowing the strategic expansion of Chinese surveillance companies worldwide. Since 2008, at least 80 countries have adopted Chinese surveillance technology platforms. These platforms are more than just security cameras: they integrate multiple government databases and provide analytic capabilities that can support multiple command and control centers. If democratic governments do not successfully demonstrate how to protect public health and human rights, they risk losing the mantle of global leadership in the 21st century. The United States must therefore better understand China’s surveillance infrastructure and why it appeals to adopting countries, using this knowledge to advance an alternate vision with its democratic allies. China employs surveillance to repress broad swaths of its population—most notably the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and nationwide—and enables other countries to execute their own surveillance systems through export of its technologies. However, several nationwide surveillance programs have escaped sustained attention. This paper will detail how these programs work and how they have enabled the deployment of current COVID-19 surveillance techniques. The United States and its allies can meet these challenges in several ways. First, the United States must reduce domestic human rights harms and racial injustice by its own companies and institutions. Second, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) can host Track 1.5 dialogues modeled off State’s Civil Society 2.0 and the Open Government Partnership to engage democratic government and non- government stakeholders in Europe, Asia, and beyond. These dialogues can Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 2 identify areas and companies engendering the greatest human rights harms from surveillance, compare and obtain best practices from existing privacy and surveillance legislation, and coordinate with the European approach to surveillance export controls—which aims to restrict surveillance technology exports on normative and non-military human rights grounds. On the technical level, national research funding organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency should support research on privacy-preserving facial recognition systems. Bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology should also expand prior research on error mitigation in facial recognition. U.S. representatives should actively engage the Global Partnership on AI’s technical expertise to propose alternate facial recognition standards to Chinese companies’ submissions at the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 3 Table of Contents Executive Summary ............................................................................................... 2 The Rise of China’s Surveillance State ................................................................ 5 The Golden Shield Project(金盾工程) ......................................................... 6 Safe Cities(平安城市)and Skynet(天网工程) .......................................... 6 Sharp Eyes(雪亮工程) .................................................................................. 7 Predictive Policing ............................................................................................ 8 Police Cloud (警务云) ............................................................................... 9 Xinjiang’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform. (一体化联合作战平台) ........................................................................... 9 China’s COVID-19 Surveillance Toolkit ........................................................... 10 Location Tracking ........................................................................................... 10 Upgraded Video Surveillance ....................................................................... 11 Key Concerns ................................................................................................. 11 How U.S. and Chinese Surveillance Approaches Broadly Differ ................... 13 Policy and Messaging Recommendations ........................................................ 14 Strengthen an Allied Approach .................................................................... 15 Identify Actors and Apply Export Controls ................................................... 16 Promote Technological Best Practices and Codify Reform ......................... 17 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. 18 Endnotes .............................................................................................................. 19 Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 4 The Rise of China’s Surveillance State Since the advent of the People’s Republic in 1949, China has honed its surveillance state to guarantee sociopolitical control. Tools deployed relied heavily, if not exclusively, on manual methods, including through danwei employment units, the hukou residency registration system, and dang’an secret political files.1 As China began to reform and open up in 1979, traditional methods lost much of their effectiveness.2 Not least, the 1989 pro- democracy protests and the following bloody crackdown, along with the domestic rise of the internet, led the Party-state leadership to tighten surveillance over an increasingly mobile and vocal citizenry. Starting in the early 1990s, technological methods began replacing many manual tools, giving rise to the modern surveillance state. China’s surveillance state combines automated and manual approaches. Officials maintain national DNA databases and extensive video surveillance networks of public and residential spaces, as well as monitor and censor internet and phone communications—enforcing de-anonymization through real-name registration requirements.3 AI is increasingly used for facial recognition, identifying persons and patterns of interest through predictive policing, and automating content moderation.4 Yet despite the government’s vision of big data seamlessly updating dossiers in real time, implementation has been hindered by human inefficiency, unreliable and incomplete basic data, and incompatible datasets or systems.5 These capabilities are often deployed as “programs” that integrate multiple databases and support command and control centers with analytic capabilities.6 Since 2003, the Chinese government has deployed several major national- level surveillance programs, overlapping with and in some cases advancing their predecessors’ goals and physical infrastructure. This paper focuses on these programs due to the availability of open source information, their nationwide reach, or the possibility that their currently localized approaches may expand across China. It is worth noting up front that the scope of these programs and their relationships to one another are frequently unclear, and there is no reliable local or nationwide breakdown of the number of facial recognition-equipped cameras.7 There are also no independently verified figures for private versus publicly owned cameras, and whether these cameras feed both local and national surveillance systems. The same uncertainty applies to the number of Center for Security and Emerging Technology | 5 cameras dedicated to commercial applications—such as paying at retail stores by entering the phone number linked to your government-issued ID and verifying your face—versus public security applications.8 China’s major surveillance programs are examined further in the following sections. The Golden Shield Project(金盾工程) The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) launched the Golden Shield Project in the early 2000s to meet the Party-state’s growing demand for greater social control over the entire population—especially political dissidents. The project incorporates technologies now central to China’s surveillance apparatus, such as internet censorship and facial and voice recognition.9 It was initially rolled out in two main phases: first through population databases, ID tracking systems, and internet surveillance tools, then through surveillance camera systems.10 According to state-run media, between 2003 and 2006, the MPS logged personal information for 96 percent (or 1.2 out of 1.3 billion) of China’s citizens.11 Facial and voice recognition technologies are key to China’s surveillance development, as examined in the following sections. Safe Cities(平安城市)and Skynet(天网工程) China achieved greater social control through Safe Cities and Skynet, two similar programs that work in tandem and are
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